Starfarers (34 page)

He rallied. “But you feel that forbidding it would be unfair to you.”

“Not me, not too much. Hanny and Tim—and, yes, poor, lonely Al—and those Tahirians who long to go starfaring …”

“And perhaps the star itself,” he conceded. “It does offer some fantastic opportunities … almost as if God is being generous—” He pulled loose from abstractions and returned to her. Breath had caught in stray locks over her brow and frozen to make starlit sparkles. “You burn to go, don’t you?”

“I could stay—aye, quite happily—if …”

“But you would always wonder what you had missed, wouldn’t you, Jean?”

Her eyes widened when he said her first name. He hurried on: “And your points about the others, and what it could all mean to the mission, yes, they are valid.”
can give you this gift, Jean, if I can bring myself to it.

“Always the man of duty, no?” He couldn’t tell whether she admired or reproached or tenderly mocked. On Earth he would soon have found out, but this wasn’t Earth.

“Let me think further,” he said. “Meanwhile, the hour’s grown late, and we’re tired and cold.”

“And you’re heavy burdened. Aye, let’s go to our sleep.”

Year three.

Envoy
had been a star, hastening through night heaven to vanish in the planetary shadow, emerging to sink toward the eastern horizon. Now it was gone. For a while people found themselves glancing aloft before they remembered. At first
they were glad of the undertakings that kept them occupied. Later, one by one and more and more, they were troubled.

A hurricane
formed in midocean. On a previous trip, the Tahirian he called Stefan had shown Ruszek the energy projectors on the little moon. With animated graphics—using conventions lately developed, mutually comprehensible—en had explained that focused beams, precisely aimed, changed the courses of such storms; they veered from coast-lands where they could wreak harm. Now en and he boarded a robotic aircraft, among those that were to monitor events from within. “You’re really learning to read our feelings, aren’t you?” Ruszek exulted.

The teardrop sped through the stratosphere. Ruszek kept his instruments going, recording whatever they were able to. Eventually he might accumulate such a stack of information that Yu could make something of it, maybe even figure out how the jetless drive worked. He suspected the principle was quantum mechanical, and a starship’s engineer was necessarily a jackleg quantum physicist. At least, when Dayan got back—

The teardrop plunged. The weather loomed black ahead. He recalled Nansen’s story about flying through stuff like this, once … but that was five thousand years and light-years away The boat slammed into the dark. Wind raved, lightning flared. Forces shoved Ruszek brutally back and forth against a safety web improvised for him. “Ha!” he bawled, and wished he were the pilot.

But the pilot was a machine. Its purpose was not to have fun but to collect data and shoot them up to the moon. Harnessed nearby, Stefan stared at a crystalline ball en clutched. Glints danced in it, barely visible to the man.
Another kind of instrument
, he guessed while his skull rattled.
Keeping track of … velocities, pressures, ionizations, a barrelful of shifty rages. Why? The robot must have full, direct input. Does Stefan want to follow along? Does en want to share
the stress, effort, risk? Did any Tahirian do anything like this, before we arrived from beyond?

Stefan gestured. The fuselage went opaque. Interior lighting went out. Ruszek sat tossed about in a blindness that shuddered and howled.

Enjoy
, he told himself, and did.

Light returned. This was no place to use a parleur, but Stefan fluted notes that were perhaps apologetic while looking with ens middle eyes at Ruszek, touching the globe, and waving at the lightnings.

En needed total darkness to take a delicate reading
, Ruszek deduced.
No … not total. Just no background. We’ve wondered if Tahirians can see single photons. Why not? Humans almost can
. A coldness crept up his spine.
Yes, I think that’s so. And … all the chaos while they evolved—let the science gang chew on the idea—but
I
think they think more naturally in quantum mechanics than we do. What does that mean for the way they understand the universe?

Wind ramped, rain and hail struck like bullets, the aircraft flew onward.

It was
not clear to Nansen and Yu why the Tahirian Emil asked them to come with en, or took them where en did. The mutual command of Cambiante was, as yet, too limited. The scope of the language was. Probably in many ways it always would be.

Its creation, which was still in process, had been comparable to the great breakthroughs in physics. Without computers to generate possible approaches, try them, discard them, and generate better ones, it would doubtless have been impossible—certainly within a lifetime, let alone a pair of years. Sonics would not do. To a Tahirian, a vocable by itself was a signal—an alarm cry, for example—but not a word. Indeed, en did not converse in what humans knew as words, but rather in mutable concepts that shaded into each other. Straightforward writing was equally insufficient. A man or woman found Tahirian ideographics hopelessly complex,
while to a Tahirian any human system, even Chinese, was bafflingly rigid.

The races had evolved separately, they experienced the world differently, and thus their minds were unlike. The most fundamental thing they had to work out was a mutual semantics.

A parleur screen displayed three-dimensional hypertext. Changes in any part of it, especially cyclic or to-and-fro changes, added a fourth dimension. Learning to write this would have imposed an intolerable strain on memory, but the nanocomputer rendered what a party entered, within the logico-grammatical rules, into agreed-on symbols. With diligence and patience, one could master these.

From either viewpoint, Cambiante was a restricted language, functioning best when it dealt with scientific and technological matters, poorly or not at all in poetics, faith, or philosophy. However, by now it could generally convey practical statements or questions reasonably well. As users discovered some of the cues in tones, attitudes, movements, even odors, they added to the vocabulary, both written and connotative.

Whatever one person understood another to be saying would scarcely ever be quite identical with the intent. But they improved.

The site
was an upland, wind-swept and stony, where turf clung in crannies and the few trees were gnarled dwarfs. Seen from above, the country showed signs of former habitation: roads, levelings, excavation where communities had been, occasional rubble heaps. Yu shivered. “Bleak,” she said.

“I suppose, as the axis of rotation shifted, it got too uncomfortable here to be worth bothering with,” Nansen suggested prosaically.

“Abandonment. A millennial necessity. What do they do when the obliquity becomes extreme?”

“Well, they seem to keep the population at half a billion
or less. It will never overcrowd whatever lands are suitable. They can move gradually. We know they plan ahead much further than that.”

“Humans would never be able to. We aren’t … sane enough. Is it really easy for Tahirians?”

The laboratory where the aircar set down was isolated, small, with sparse facilities. Although it and associated buildings were well maintained by robots, everything stood long unused. Such amenities as heat and running water must be restarted. The guests had been told to bring their own sanitary unit and whatever else they would need.

Two who were strangers to them waited outside. With Emil, they hustled the newcomers along, barely letting them unload their baggage in a house before conducting them to the laboratory. “No time for a cup of tea?” asked Yu, only partly in jest.

“Plain to see, they’re in a hurry.” Nansen frowned. “Do they want to make sure they accomplish what they have in mind before anyone else finds out?”

Once inside, the two other Tahirians were straightaway busy at control boards. Emil faced the humans. “(We wish to convey certain information,)” en spelled out. “(At the present stage of communication, it is best done through graphics, using a larger screen than a parleur’s.)”

“But why just here?” Nansen muttered in Spanish. Yu trembled, mainly with eagerness.

Imagery appeared, drawings and numbers, symbolizations meaningful to the watchers.

A sun that exploded, blown-off gas ramming outward to shock against englobing nebulosity—

The remnant dwindling and dwindling, as if downward into nothingness—

Against the background of the stars, a sphere absolutely dark, save for a fiery ring of matter whirling inward—

Close-up of the rim, and the sky behind it eerily distorted—

“A black hole,” Yu breathed. “A supernova greater than
the one that made the pulsar. Collapse beyond the neutron stage, in past an event horizon, falling forever.”

The image receded in sight. A map of local star distributions replaced it. A marker ran from a dot marked with the sign for Tahir’s sun, unrolling a distance scale behind it. When it stopped, Nansen read, “About five hundred light-years away. That’s as of today. Obviously it was farther when the eruption happened, or this planet would have suffered badly. But what has it to do with us?”

“Hush,” Yu murmured. “There’s more.”

They peered and puzzled. The characters were mostly unknown to them. “I think that’s the ‘organism’ radical,” Yu said, pointing. “But why are those quantum physics symbols attached?”

Emil trod back in front of them and fingered ens parleur. “(Life)” en declared. “(Intelligence.)”

“
¿Qué es?”
ripped from Nansen. “No!”

“How?” Yu whispered. “It … seems … impossible. But—look, the big display—something about quantum states … I can’t quite understand it. I don’t think Hanny could, either. Not yet.”

Emil whistled what they had come to recognize as a note of warning. “(Do not reveal this until further notice,)” en said.

Nansen steadied the parleur in his grasp. “(Not to our shipmates? Why?)”

“(It is dangerous.)” Emil paused. “(If you must tell any, be sure they will let it go no further.)”

“Someone doesn’t want us to know,” Nansen said.

Dismay shook Yu’s voice. “Factions, among these people?”

“I’ve been getting strong hints of it. We shall have to be careful,”
when we cannot now escape to the stars.

“I can’t believe they would be violent. I won’t believe it.”

“I would rather not, myself. But sometimes there are worse things than violence.”

Emil observed them. “(You are weary and perplexed,)” en
said. “(The sun is low. Best you take refreshment, rest, and thought. We will resume tomorrow morning early.)”

“That means a short night’s rest.” Nansen chuckled a bit. “Well, I don’t expect I’d sleep much in any case.”

“Nor I,” Yu agreed. “Not when this is waiting.”

The walk across to their quarters was through a chill wind. They didn’t feel it. Emil left them at the entrance. The dilation closed behind them. They were in a curve-walled, rosy-tinted room, bare except for his outfit, their food and drink, and a glower to warm the rations. She had taken the adjoining chamber. Eyes looked into eyes.

“Don’t worry,” Nansen said. “Our friends must know what they’re doing—whatever it is.”

Yu shook her head. The bobbed blue-black hair swished past the high cheekbones. “No fear. The wonder of it! Something utterly strange, I don’t know what, but something we could never have foreseen if we’d stayed home—Oh, Rico, we haven’t come this whole long way for nothing!”

“Ay, sí.”
Upborne together, they embraced. It became a kiss.

He let go and stepped back. “Forgive me,” he said unevenly. “That won’t happen again.”

“I helped it happen.” Her laughter drained away into sobriety. “You are right, it had better not again. We must be careful about more than secrets.”

He smiled. “Agreed. Permit me only to envy Ajit Sundaram a little in my heart, as well as respect him and you.”

“You have a hard time ahead,” she answered. “May it end happily.” She hunkered down at the supply pile. “Come, let’s put this in order and have that cup of tea before we eat.”

The island
was beautiful.

There could be no real knowledge of the life on a planet unless that knowledge included the life in its seas. Once this desire had been expressed to them, some Tahirians brought Mokoena and Zeyd there. Robotic boats came and went from a dockside building full of investigative equipment. It
was probably a monitoring station rather than a research laboratory. The civilization must have catalogued every species but be concerned with maintaining a healthy ecology.

At the end of a hard day’s study the humans felt ready for some recreation. Walking across a wooded corner of the island, they emerged on a strip of turf, beyond which a beach lay dazzling white under a clear sky and long sunbeams from the west. The air was warm but laden with fresh sea smells. The ocean rolled deeply blue. Although tides were less than Earth’s, at this point the conformation of the bottom made breakers high and thunderous.

Mokoena clapped her hands together. “What a surf!” she whooped. “I’m going in.”

“Not alone, please,” Zeyd cautioned. “The undertow may be bad.”

“Well, I appoint you my lifeguard,” she laughed.

Her mood captured him. “Why not your partner?”

“Why not indeed?”

For an instant they hesitated, but only an instant. After all, they had stripped before. Clothes fell off. They ran over the sand and into the waves.

The water brawled and surged. When they plunged, it slid sensuously around them, a pulsing whole-body caress. They frisked and frolicked like seals.

Still, they remembered not to get beyond their depth. A comber broke over their heads. They collided, caught at one another, found footing, and sank their toes into shifting grit. The wave rushed on past. Chest deep, Zeyd gazed down into Mokoena’s face. Her lips were parted, her breasts thrust against him as she snatched for breath. He kissed her. She responded.